RSS Can Save The Internet

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REGENDarySumanai said:
I've never really dabbled with RSS, but this does sound like a good time to start and get experience with it.
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Fundamentally, humans like telling each other stories. If you want to sell me on the idea of RSS, I need to see you use RSS yourself, in a short series where you consume the RSS content in a way where I can watch over your shoulder and emulate it if I find you or the way you do it charismatic. Then I will ape this behavior and spread it to my normies.

Anyways, if you or OP feel like blogposting this little thought experiment, you've got one viewer. It's also probably a good base for a short video series if you have a youtube channel. I'd watch someone RSS the latest 2D cartoon and crypto news and enjoy seeing them chimp out at various stories while I watch them curate and add/delete RSS elements to their inbox.
 
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Last month I exceeded my 500 feed limit on Feedly and had to delete a lot of old/dead feeds. I wouldn't really listen to podcasts if it wasn't for RSS. I also love my search string YT feeds.
 
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5000+ feeds here on my self hosted reader, <10 are podcasts and I usually skip those.
Text is easier for filtering and highlighting.
 
This is interesting, China really hates RSS:
Two RSS reader apps, Reeder and Fiery Feeds, said this week that their iOS apps have been removed in China over content that deemed “illegal” by the local cyber watchdog.
[...]
Feed readers of RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, are particularly troubling to the authority because they fetch content from third-party websites, allowing users to bypass China’s Great Firewall and reach otherwise forbidden information, ...
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And they banned RSS stuff since 2007:
The history of China’s crackdown on RSS dates back to 2007 when the authority launched a blanket ban on web-based RSS feed aggregators.
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Can you honestly ask someone to visit your WordPress blog in [CURRENT YEAR]? Maybe, but they'll likely forget about it never come back. It's not part of the users routine to visit your website, especially if your website only updates once a week or even once a month.
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Problem with that is, if those users are too distracted/lazy to visit back your website and keep refreshing Reddit or Youtube, then checking a RSS reader will likely also not be in their routine. ( Unless they're on mobile, using notifications )

But I still agree that RSS is really useful, even in 2020. Not just to keep track of the obscure sites, but in my personal opinion also a better way to browse social media. I can't stand the huge thumbnails at the Youtube subscription tab if i'm subscribed to many channels.
 
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Bump because someone shared a decent overview of RSS on HN.

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ncase.me

Back to the Future with RSS!

How to save the open web, & get (re)started with RSS
ncase.me ncase.me

I never cared much for RSS but considering the current state of things, I should certainly look back into it. RSS is not only clickbait-free, but also ad and cookie-free.

Also,

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0chan

0chan.vip 0chan.vip

Interesting concept. Could this work?
:thinking:
 
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Ahriman said:
Interesting concept. Could this work?
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For certain values of "work", yes. FMS on Freenet works essentially the same way except the data is stored on Freenet rather than as text files retrieved over HTTP.

Where it runs into problems is with moderation. Typically these sorts of systems just outsource the problem to the node operator. There's no single source of truth. I can't see it scaling to a place like this.
Also, the further away you get from screenloads of plain, anonymous text the more practical difficulties pop up that don't have good solutions in a distributed environment - at least not so far.
 
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Atom is objectively superior to RSS. Here's my question: is JSONfeed worth developing for & shilling, or is it just another useless meme?

EDIT: Googled this on a whim: https://activitystrea.ms/specs/atom/1.0/
Looks fairly promising.

I still haven't taken the time to fully study activitystreams / activitypub / PubSubHubbub, but I'm going to make the plunge soon. Any suggestions? (Sorry if this is the wrong thread.)
 
I never stopped using RSS feeds so the advantages of them were never a lost art for me. I didn't realize until they declined how superior blogs were for niche audience investigative pieces, short essays, etc. Twitter has been a terrible fucking replacement, now when in the past when I've asked for someone's research on various topics, instead of a blog, I get directed to some 78 part tweet thread (often half broken, decoupled, some repliers banned, etc) that I can't find.
 
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BootlegPopeye said:
I never stopped using RSS feeds so the advantages of them were never a lost art for me. I didn't realize until they declined how superior blogs were for niche audience investigative pieces, short essays, etc. Twitter has been a terrible fucking replacement, now when in the past when I've asked for someone's research on various topics, instead of a blog, I get directed to some 78 part tweet thread (often half broken, decoupled, some repliers banned, etc) that I can't find.
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Twitter and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
 
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Ahriman said:
I never cared much for RSS but considering the current state of things, I should certainly look back into it. RSS is not only clickbait-free, but also ad and cookie-free.
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Put clickbait in your RSS reader, but isolate it to a folder you never read and manually purge the folder periodically.

Occasionally, you'll hear about some drama that the clickbaiting scum tried to memoryhole, but it'll be archived in your RSS reader. (only works on feeds that send the whole article)

Also is useful for tweets from idiots, but you need a bridge like rsshub.app to convert to RSS.

OH and YouTube channels too. It's a great technique for catching links to livestreams that get switched to unlisted.
 
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Seeing as its been talked about, but no-one has said how you actually do it, Its stupid easy but you never know who might need it.
Say you wanted to get an rss feed for Explaining Computers you would search them on youtube. then in the urlbar, you would see this


you take the channel id: UCbiGcwDWZjz05njNPrJU7jA (in this case)

and add it to this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
so it becomes:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbiGcwDWZjz05njNPrJU7jA

this is what you put into your rss aggregator, i recommend self-hosted
edit: formatting

I just througt of another use for RSS, say you like audiobooks, like i do, but you dont want to pay. so you decide to torrent, that will lead you too audiobookbay they provide an atom feed or a rss 2.0 feed which if you know programming you can leverage to do some work for you:
Python: 
import feedparser as nullIsAFeeder
import re
sneed = nullIsAFeeder.parse('http://audiobookbay.nl/feed/')
books = ['doors of stone','spellmonger']
for freeBooks in sneed.entries:
    if re.compile('|'.join(books),re.IGNORECASE).search(freeBooks.title):
        print (freeBooks.title)
    else:
        pass
this is just something i threw together in a couple of mins. but say you add that to a cronjob that runs every 10-15 minutes ish.

You can make the script work for you. in this case it looks for books with spellmonger in the title, or a very specific book called doors of stone. Hopefully the depressed piece of shit that is writing the book. publishes before he kills himself

edit: formatting
 
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Ahriman said:
Went ahead and took the plunge.

However,

View attachment 2314283

I kinda don't wanna install JRE... but okay. 😩

EDIT:

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The latest version is way too old.

View attachment 2314371

So RSSOwl is not good, people are suggesting to move over to RSSOwlnix instead.
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I think it was fine at the time I posted the OP, I dunno, I've never used it, I just tried to find something FOSS and vaguely popular for Windows. Personally I used to use tt-rss and then moved to miniflux, but those are webservices and desktop applications.
 
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